‘There are places where one has chosen to live, invisible abodes which one makes for oneself quite outside the current of time. I have lived in Tibur, and shall die there, perhaps, as Hadrian did on Achilles’ Isle’ (Yourcenar, cited 280).

Bradley cites this plangent passage from Marguerite Yourcenar’s Carnets in which she imagines stepping through the ancient world and also imagines that this is the landscape that will be in her mind’s eye as she dies. Her musings here echo Hadrian’s anticipation of his own death in Mémoires d’Hadrien: ‘Here in Tibur, in the full heat of May, I listen for the waves’ slow complaint on the beach of the isle of Achilles […] That place which I shall never see is becoming my secret abode, my innermost haven. I shall doubtless be there at the moment of my death’ (cited 281). The resonances between the two statements indicate how enmeshed Yourcenar’s identity was with her project of recreating Hadrian’s inner world. For B. the passage functions as a sphragis, confirming that the life story of Yourcenar and the life story of Hadrian are inextricably linked, that they are ‘sealed together, as friends, in the same thought process’ (281). The story of Hadrian shaped Yourcenar’s intellectual identity — his was a presence that never left her. B. points out later in the book that she claimed that she would give ‘a year of her life to spend an hour with Hadrian’ (297). This book is very much the story of the relationship between Hadrian and Yourcenar, and offers a vivid depiction of Yourcenar herself as a prickly, difficult, brilliant intellectual.

This book is a labour of love which takes as its subject another labour of love — Yourcenar’s recreation of Hadrian’s life in Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951), the work for which she is best known. It is rare to find a book as extensively and meticulously researched as this one. B. analyses and evaluates the sources that Yourcenar used in her own painstaking research. Yourcenar’s obsessive need for accuracy is shown through fascinating vignettes, such as the time when a friend, Constantin Dimaras, queried the depiction of a stack of Roman coins, wondering whether they would stand in a stack in the way that modern coins do. Yourcenar tested this out using a set of ancient coins from a museum in Avrenches. We are also shown Yourcenar’s library through B.’s eyes — he points out that it includes works on Hadrian that postdate Mémoires, further proof of the abiding fascination that he held for her. Not only does B. read the works on which Yourcenar depended, but he also contextualises the project both through the historical period in which Yourcenar was writing (he cites from her writings in which she likens Hadrian to a blend of André Gide and Trygve Lie) and through developments in biography as a genre. He is acutely sensitive to the ways in which a post-World War 2 environment must shape her writing. He is equally alive to the literary influences shimmering within Mémoires. When Yourcenar wrote ‘In our day, when introspection tends to dominate literary forms, the historical novel, or what may for convenience’s sake be called by that name, must take the plunge into time recaptured, and must fully establish itself within some inner world’ (cited 15), she is, as B. points out, aligning her work with Proust’s vision. B. also alludes to Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey in his evocation of Yourcenar’s vision of Hadrian.

This erudition is worn lightly, but informs every page of this fascinating, multi-faceted volume in which he recreates the story of an author whose originality and genius lay in her imagining of the rich inner life of Hadrian.